


The mission.

by orange_crushed



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-16
Updated: 2011-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-18 03:36:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's beginning to understand how somebody could do this their whole life and still be rubbish at it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The mission.

Quite often, she misses.

Wrong street. Wrong day. Forty-three minutes and nineteen seconds too late, and she gets to watch the ambulance pull away with him inside. Two days earlier and she wanders the streets, alone, looking at Christmas decorations until the waning signal draws her back. She's beginning to understand how somebody could do this their whole life and still be rubbish at it.

Luckily, he'd had other talents.

 

 

Donna asks her again why she always wears the same clothes, and it's such a stupidly simple answer that she can't even say it. Because the TARDIS doesn't have the strength to sustain her room anymore, so it's been buried in the corridor with the rest of the sprawl, dead as nerve endings. Because if she had the time for a nice shower and a change of clothes, maybe she'd have time to sleep, too. Because when you wear it long enough, it becomes your armor. That's something she learned from him.

"Honestly ?" she asks. Rose smiles crookedly, scratches the back of her neck in a gesture she doesn't even recognize as borrowed. "Because I don't remember which universe my closet's in."

"Now that," Donna says, "I understand."

 

 

The UNIT guard they give her, when they can find her, is only a formality. An honor. They opened their files to her because she opened the door of the TARDIS, and could call it by name in a way that made it answer. Because in reality, crippled as they are, they now have only two missions: protecting the world from any _additional_ apocalypses and following Rose Tyler around, taking notes.

She loathes the saluting but the guard doesn't bother her, nor does the gun; this world's a terrifying place. Not a sentiment she used to carry, no; she used to love the insanity and the beauty of it all. Sometimes, she thinks the void killed her when she passed through it, and that this woman who walks around using her voice is a ghost.

"That's ridiculous," Donna says. She takes another sip of her coffee. "I mean, that's not even possible. Right ?" Rose doesn't answer. "Right ?" She frowns. "Well. Thanks for the reassuring words, Lady Dire." Rose breaks at that, and laughs, doubling over against the console; and then they're both laughing, nervously hilarious, and Donna splashes coffee onto the stabilizers.

She might well be alive after all.

 

 

Before- in her old life, the one in color- there was never a mission. Not really. They'd saved the world, over and over again, because they could. Because the world was there, and they lived in it together.

Now the mission looms ahead of everything, almost as chilling as the fate she's fighting to prevent. She hardens her heart against the massacres, the camps; she works day and night- though lacking any meaningful concept of those terms- to find Donna at the right times, the right places. If she makes this happen she can save a hundred worlds. A million. A million million.

But-

-a van in the middle of the street and a family up against it, hands on the hood, screaming for mercy from soldiers barely out of their teens; little more than boys, families lost in the blast, comrades gassed in their jeeps, nobody to fight except these innocent people with outdated passports. It could end badly because she must have seen it happen before, knows that it's happening across the country and across the planet. She can't stop every injustice, right every wrong.

"This isn't the mission," her UNIT guard says, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. "We should get back." Ross, his name is. Ross. A good young man, sad-eyed. "You can't do everything. Be everywhere."

Oh, she knows.

"But I'm here now," she says, and gets out of the car.

 

 

She remembers the days when-

- _everybody lives, Rose. Everybody lives_.

"Two words," she whispers. She leans close to Donna and murmurs her message; she holds the cooling hands and watches her eyes flutter shut. Her heart's still beating- when it stops, time resets, and Rose will be on her way again. But until then she can't leave her here, alone.

"Did you know her ?" the van driver asks, penitent and frightened at her side, mangling his hat in his hands. "Did you know her ?"

"I will," says Rose.


End file.
